Being in Vladimir Nabakov’s orbit seems to have been a lot like reading one of his books: he gave people the impression that they had the full focus of the sun, and they left feeling that everything else was much duller by comparison. Several books could be filled describing Nabokov’s complex relationships with, and his ultimate effect on, those closest to him: there is his lover, Irina, whom Nabokov ultimately forfeits for the sake of his family; there is his son, Dmitri, who first takes up opera so as to be incomparable with his father and later inherits his mother’s love of speed, which he believes to be a more attainable goal; and there is Dmitri’s mother and Vladimir’s wife, Vera. After learning about Vera Nabakov, one might find it foolish that Dmitri considered his mother the safer parent to emulate.
Vera, Nabakov’s typist, editor, and de facto business manager, is the subject of Monika Zgustova’s slim new novel, A Revolver to Carry at Night. Recognizing early on her lack of raw creative talent, Vera decides to make her mark on world literature by fine-tuning her brilliant husband’s masterpieces. Yet Vera never gives up her creative instincts, and Zgustova even suggests that her motivation in wielding it might not have always been in the pure service of art.
In the very first paragraph, we learn:
He recognized that whenever he conferred a touching detail from his own life on one of his characters, it was quickly absorbed by the fictional world in which it had been unceremoniously dropped. Even if it did stay with him, the warmth and charm it had enjoyed in his memory began to dissipate, until after a while it became more intimately related to the novel than to his own experience.
Here, Nabokov is aware that by using memories to populate a novel, he is distancing himself from those memories. Wonderfully, the scene shows Nabokov resisting this transfer of experience, unwilling to sacrifice his most precious memories for the sake of his art. Persuading him to do so, as we will see, is Vera’s task.
As we dive into Nabokov’s memories and the novels they inform, we learn about the relationship between his life and his fiction, and we come to understand that a great portion of his best work was inspired by his extramarital affairs and friendships — in other words, by his life without Vera. This is not a story of a wife against an extramarital affair, or even of a creator against the things that will impede creation. Rather, it is a story of the friction between the two. While they differ in foundation, they share the same goal: to make Vladimir Nabokov write books.
The reader is left to decide whether Vera’s motivations are literary, domestic, or some combination of the two. She certainly thinks they are literary, but she also understands her husband’s creative processes well enough to suspect that his pen is a better way to clear his head of old dalliances than the best of her jealous guarding can be. Pushing him to divulge his experience in writing is a means, for Vera, of killing two birds with one stone: she gets to make her mark on the literary world through her husband, and she gets to exorcise the memories of Vladimir’s other lovers.
Whether or not this interplay of memory, art, and motivation is historical, Zgustova makes it convincing. In just one hundred and fifty pages and an array of quiet scenes, she gives us a provocative, psychological portrait of a remarkable woman and the man she helped to steer toward greatness.
Daniel H. Turtel is the author of the novels The Family Morfawitz and Greetings from Asbury Park, winner of the Faulkner Society Award for Best Novel. He graduated from Duke University with a degree in mathematics and received an MFA from the New School. He now lives in New York City.
